The Babysitter’s Coven

Posted on 4th November 2019

Author: Kate Williams

Genre: YA/paranormal

Pages: 368

Format: hardcover

Rating:

Description: Seventeen-year-old Esme Pearl has a babysitters club. She knows it’s kinda lame, but what else is she supposed to do? Get a job? Gross. Besides, Esme likes babysitting, and she’s good at it. And lately Esme needs all the cash she can get, because it seems like destruction follows her wherever she goes. Let’s just say she owes some people a new tree.

Enter Cassandra Heaven. She’s Instagram-model hot, dresses like she found her clothes in a dumpster, and has a rebellious streak as gnarly as the cafeteria food. So why is Cassandra willing to do anything, even take on a potty-training two-year-old, to join Esme’s babysitters club?

The answer lies in a mysterious note Cassandra’s mother left her: “Find the babysitters. Love, Mom.”

Turns out, Esme and Cassandra have more in common than they think, and they’re about to discover what being a babysitter really means: a heroic lineage of superpowers, magic rituals, and saving the innocent from seriously terrifying evil. And all before the parents get home.

Review

Esme loves babysitting. Cassie is the new girl, and when Esme invites her to join the babysitting club Cassie is excited. But not all is as it seems. Cassie has a message from her mother, and it seems to herald dark things to come. There is magic in the air…

I will admit, I almost bought this book. Almost preordered it. And as much as I hate to say it, I’m glad I didn’t. I feel as if this book was not what it was advertised as. It was sort of the babysitter’s club? But not really. From the very first we have our main character explaining who everyone is and that they babysit.

Babysitting was making me hallucinate.

This book just wasn’t my thing. I loved Buffy. Buffy is one of the shows I go back to all the time. And this book was supposed to be like that? I didn’t see it at all. And the little that I may have seen was crammed into the last fifty pages! It didn’t work for me. I think if the “Babysitter’s Coven” part had actually been introduced as it was later in the book earlier on I would have enjoyed it more. As it was, the first half of the book was slow. But it was slow in a way that I felt was boring. Nothing happened, some strange people come to town, accidents happen, but none of it made me love the book.

The unfortunate thing is that I was bored. The concept sounded so cool, but I felt that it wasn’t working at all in this book for me. In fact I wanted to skip about half of it. (Side note: I did skim about thirty pages towards the end, because at that point the book had lost me and I just wanted to know what happened.) I don’t like to skim books.

The plot felt weak overall, and that it wasn’t buoyed by interesting characters. They all fell very flat to me, and I wasn’t engaged with them at all. I didn’t care what happened to them. I just didn’t feel it. Cassie and Esme were bland. I can’t even really describe them.

The writing was fine. It read easily and quickly, mostly.

I honestly don’t have too much to say about this book – it was a mediocre read for me and disappointing on all levels. I was so ready to love it. This is definitely the most disappointing read of the year for me.

I know people have different tastes, but this one really didn’t work for me at all. There was so much potential, and it just fell so, so flat for me.